Social networking services have become some of the most popular forms of online services. While currently individuals primarily sign up for social networking services for personal use, efforts are underway to leverage social media such as Facebook®, Twitter®, LinkedIn®, etc. for business use. Companies such as Hearsay Social® are developing products for growing businesses using social media, allowing company employees to use their online social presence and connections to market products, maintain customer relationships, etc. The multitude of social media platforms and their intrinsic nature as forums for individual users present a number of issues for corporate users.
One of the issues associated with harnessing social media for business purposes is the ease of use. Due to the number of individual social media platforms, an employee at a company often has to create and manage multiple accounts, resulting in poor ease of use.
Further, since the online presence is usually directly managed by individual employees (e.g., an insurance sales representative would manage his own Facebook® page), should the employee leave the company, the management would have little control over the accounts and may experience difficulties disassociating the company from the former employee's social media presence.
Another issue arises from the identification of online presence to actual individual persons. On a social media platform, there can be many users having the same/similar name. A company's management would want to have the ability to identify those who are actually affiliated with the company to ensure compliance (e.g., no improper advertising of financial services in violation with federal or state law, etc.). Presently, however, this is difficult to achieve.
Another issue is managing permissions to the accounts. The typical social media sites give “all or nothing” permissions; in other words, a user either has full control to all features such as posting, commenting, deleting, etc., or has no access to the account at all. An additional issue involves managing employees at different corporate branches/regions, which is difficult to do on existing social media platforms.